CHAPTER III.
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Racial prejudice was cherished as a virtue in the Old Colonie and the real, solid Dutch families found it anything but creditable that Van Der Zee children—we had the honor of being regarded as Van Der Zees in Beaver street—should be sent to an English school in far off Boston town. Massachusetts was, to them, an English colony, and the people there were English, that is to say, foreigners, strangers, and not to be trusted. However, when it was learned that we were actually going, and mother set about making the elaborate preparations considered necessary for so formidable an undertaking, kind friends came in bringing gifts deemed suitable for the occasion, knitted mittens and mufflers, pies and cakes, apples and cider, and choice stores of the cellar and pantry enough to provision a ship for a long cruise. My nearest boy friend, Gratz Van Rensselaer, gave me his knife. How close were our relations may be understood from the fact that we had a private signal, a peculiar whistle of our own which we used to call each other, as boys are wont to do when on terms of exclusive intimacy. To quote Mr. Peggotty, “A man can’t say fairer nor that, now, can he?”
When Gratz went down into his pockets and handed me that knife in solemn silence, I fully realized that he was making a sacrifice on the altar of friendship. Any critic of this writing will be justified in objecting that I did not probably formulate the idea in just these terms, but this is about the size of it, all the same.
Whether my schoolmate ever afterward used our call, I do not know, as our parting was a finality, but for my part, I took it with me to Brook Farm where my new mates adopted it forthwith. Later, the elders took it up, and eventually it became widely known over the face of the earth as “the Brook Farm call.” It went to California with a young married couple in the early fifties; to China with one of our boys who became the Captain of a Pacific steamer; to Spain and to Russia with another in the United States diplomatic service; to Italy with two girls whose father was an artist; to the Philippines with students returning to their home in Manila, and to all quarters where Brook Farmers found their way, as they seem always to have remembered it.
A peculiarity which may have helped keep it in mind was that it consisted of two parts, the summons, and the response; the first part differing slightly from the second, to distinguish friend answering friend from the stranger merely imitating sounds accidentally or incidentally heard. Just what the difference was may be learned from the notation here given.
Another peculiarity of the call was that it had the quality of taking character from the person uttering it. For example, Annie Page was the girl I most devotedly admired, and when “she gaed me her answer true” in response to my signal, her musical little trill sounded to me like the voice of the thrush that sang down in the pine woods. Per contra, there was Frank Barlow, whom we used to call “Crazy Barlow” because of his headlong rush at whatever object he had in view, and he could make the call shrill and thrill like a fife.
I met Frank one morning in the later days of the Civil War when he was striding along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington at his usual breakneck pace. He was Major General Barlow, then, one of the great generals of the Union Army, but he was, first, last and always, a Brook Farmer, so I signaled to him with the same old call. He came to an abrupt halt, answered my greeting and dashed across the Avenue with both hands extended. Neither of us had more than a short allowance of time, but we could do no less than adjourn to a convenient resort for a good hearty talk about the old days in West Roxbury.
Other experiences with the call have come to me since then but none that I remember with more pleasure. To-day there are few or none to answer, no matter how earnestly I might sound the old appeal. As may be seen above, the little succession of notes is very simple, but they convey a world meaning to my old ear.